Emergency department patient flow chart template

A patient pathway works best as a swimlane, because a visit is a series of handovers between teams rather than one continuous activity. We recommend following this process:

1. List every step a patient passes through, from arrival to disposition.
2. Assign each step to the team that performs it, with the patient as a lane of their own.
3. Sequence the steps inside each lane and mark the points where one team is waiting on another.
4. Add a decision node wherever the pathway can branch, and label each exit with the outcome rather than yes or no.
5. Draw it in the tool your audience already uses. A free template removes most of the layout work.

This template documents an operational pathway, not clinical guidance. Local protocols always take precedence.

Each lane groups the steps that belong together:

• Patient: arrival and registration.
• Triage: assessment and acuity assignment.
• ED physician: examination, tests, diagnosis, and the disposition decision.
• Disposition: the two outcomes the visit can end in.

Add a lane for nursing, radiology, laboratory, or a specialty consult if your pathway needs it. Add layout inserts it, and the diagram reflows around it.

Acuity is a rating of how urgently a patient needs to be seen, assigned at triage and used to sequence care rather than to diagnose. Most emergency departments use a five-level scale, with level one being immediately life-threatening and level five being non-urgent.

Widely used systems include the Emergency Severity Index in the United States, the Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale, and the Manchester Triage System in the UK and Europe. Which scale applies, and how it is scored, is set by local protocol.

Disposition is the decision about where the patient goes when their emergency care ends. In this template, it resolves to two outcomes: discharge or admission, because those are the two that account for most visits.

Real departments often need more: transfer to another facility, observation, leaving against medical advice, or death in the department. Add them as further exits from the same decision node if your pathway records them.

Because the question is not a yes or no question. Yes and no only work when a decision has two opposed answers; disposition has two parallel outcomes, and labelling them yes and no would force an arbitrary choice about which one counts as yes.

Naming the exits after the outcomes makes the diagram readable without a legend, and it makes adding a third outcome straightforward rather than structurally awkward.

Almost always at the handovers rather than inside the steps. The common ones:

• Between triage and assessment, when no cubicle or clinician is free.
• Between tests ordered and results returned, where the ED is waiting on another department.
• Between the decision to admit and a bed becoming available, which is usually a hospital-wide constraint rather than an ED one.

Mapping the pathway does not remove those delays, but it does make them attributable, which is the first step in a capacity conversation.

Patient flow describes how a person moves through a department: the operational sequence of steps, handovers, and waits. A clinical pathway describes how a specific condition should be treated.

The difference matters in practice: patient flow is owned by operations and applies to every visit, while a clinical pathway is owned clinically and applies to one presentation. This template maps the first.

Every lane should have a named owner, and the handovers between them are where visits stall:

• Reception or admissions: arrival and registration.
• Triage nurse: assessment and acuity.
• ED physician: examination, tests, diagnosis, and disposition.
• Bed management or the admitting team: what happens after an admit decision, which is where the longest waits usually sit.

The download is a free .pptx made of native PowerPoint shapes, so anyone can open, read, and edit it, and you can share it as you would any deck; recipients need nothing installed.

The smart connectors, Auto Layout, and Lucen AI come from the Lucen Flowchart add-in, which adds a Lucen Flowchart tab to the ribbon and runs on Windows with PowerPoint 2016 or later and with PowerPoint for Microsoft 365. PowerPoint for the web, Mac, and mobile are not supported. Setup and troubleshooting steps are in Lucen Support.